The Accidental Detective (Hannah Tree: Private Detective Book 1)

Justice has a new name: Hannah Tree

She’s done time, she’s broken the rules—and now, she’s taking justice into her own hands. When Hannah Tree is released from a psychiatric clinic after a short prison stint, she never expects to become a private investigator. But with the guidance of her sharp-eyed mentor, Gloria Starr, Hannah turns her obsession with justice—and her need for revenge—into something more.

Her first case? A suspicious judge, a mysterious club, and a revelation that shatters everything: her father, the man she’s spent her life trying to expose, is right at the center of it all. As Hannah dives deeper into a web of corruption, hidden abuse, and high-society secrets, she begins to uncover a horrifying underground operation. The truth is dangerous, and justice has never been further out of reach—but Hannah isn’t backing down.

Trigger warning: This book contains sensitive content which some readers may find disturbing.

Start the journey with The Accidental Detective, the gripping first installment in a dark, high-stakes thriller series.

Excerpt from the book

I was, as usual, staring down the stew of the day when a loud male voice rang out across the cafeteria.

‘No darling, the shrinks are stupid!’

Always on the lookout for anything to relieve the stultifying boredom of the place, my eyes lit up. I swung around searching for the source of the eruption.

It was a woman – an extraordinarily large woman. She had white-blonde hair in a towering pompadour, black-rimmed eyes and luminous pink lipstick. Her face was craggy and lantern jawed, and I reckoned she must have been a fairly ugly man back in the day. The image was softened by the pink ostrich feathers that floated around her neck on one of those peignoir things.

She was sitting at a table surrounded by much smaller people who were looking on in awe as she continued. ‘Bastards, they know nothing! That stupid prick keeps telling me that I’m depressed because I’m transgender. I pay the clown and he hasn’t heard a word I’ve said. I’ve told him countless times that I am not depressed because I am transgender. I’m depressed because I can't afford the operation. And when I told him today that he’s fired, do you know what he said? He said I have an anger issue.’

I barely managed to stop myself from rolling around on the floor in hysterics when, after a low murmur from her companions, she started again. This time her voice was so low that I had to edge my chair closer towards her table to hear her.

‘Anger issue, I said. Anger issue? No, pet, I said’ – her voice rose again to full blast – ‘I don’t have an anger issue – I have a stupidity issue!’

With that, she rose out of her chair like a bear looking for a fight. She was at least six-and-a-half feet tall, and all the nice, suburban lady patients took one look and scuttled out of the room. Strong emotions were like a terrorist attack around there. Though why they thought people were there in the first place I couldn’t imagine. I often wondered whether the staff should have carried out daily emotional defence drills like the shooter drills in the US.

I, on the other hand, was getting off on the drama of it. By the time the two male nurses arrived, only Gloria’s entourage and I were left.

‘Oh dear,’ she bellowed, ‘speaking of stupidity, here come Tweedledum and Tweedledee.’

She turned back to her audience with a giant grin, tossed her head and, gyrating her hips, slithered towards them. It was brilliantly obscene. By then, I was sweating with delight, and my smile was wrapped around my ears. The nurses flapped their hands as she backed them up against the salad bar.

‘Hello, boys, wanna dance?’

‘Now, Gloria, you know this is not—’ said one of the nurses.

It was Colin, a soppy bugger whose answer to almost everything, including the darkest despair, was ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ He was sliding backwards into the salami and coleslaw as Gloria leaned across him, still rotating her hips.